[self geekingAround:YES];

Keep on blogging ...

2009-12-31T08:19:00.000-08:00

In my quest for a better blogging output, I've come across Tumblr, which to me is somewhat of a cross between Blogger and Twitter. And, this is something which I believe is more akin to get me to blog more often especially since Tumblr's got a (free) iPhone app (one of many goodies) which allow to post things (including multimedia stuff) more easily.

Anyway, so I'm sort of moving this blog over to Tumblr, sorry about the inconvenient this may cause :P You can follow me from now on there.

This is Cocoaaaaaaa!!

2009-12-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

Once again, sorry for the extra long delay between posts ... I know how hard it must be for the five of you :P ... The usual excuse apply: Twitter, lack of time & Tiger Woods all came together to create a worm whole in which I vanished for a while ...

Anyway I finally started, two nights ago, the implementation of that game for iPhone I was talking about a while go ... Except it's not the same game! A couple of weeks ago, I completed the grunt of the work on the game engine (including the audio stuff!) and I was seized by an uncontrollable spur of creativity focused on different concept than the one I had been toying around with. Now, thanks to my paranoia, I'm not going to share much on the game itself for a little while, at least not until it is well advanced. All I can said, is that it'll be retro (graphics, sounds and concept) and hopefully fun (or so I hope). What I can talk about, however, is some of the design/implementation decisions. So stay tuned :)

On ur iPhone! Stealin' ur CPU cyclez!

2009-09-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

Last night, I finally managed to build and run my engineering test app for my game engine on my iPhone. Since OS 3.0 have come out, what use to be a tricky and error prone process (I'm talking about provisioning and code signing) have been improved vastly (BTW, thanks Apple!). If you have been in the iPhone development business for more than 6 months, you know what I'm talking about.

In fact, since it had been a while since I had to create an app-id or a provision profile, I was pleased to see that Apple had added an assistant to complete such basic (and yet daunting) tasks! And what do you know, it did more or less work as expected! I said more or less 'cause I got a little confused when creating the app-id, and instead of ending with the id been com.cocoageek.test, I just ended up with the id test. Here, I'd like to blame the assistant for this, simply because it fail to giving some example of what each fields expect. Make you think that it will be nice to be able to delete app-id ...

Anyway, the test app is running well. The frame rate (with collision between objects happening) seems smooth (I haven't measured it) so far. I'm a bit disappointed, however, by the anti-aliasing which doesn't seems to be as nice on the device as it is on my laptop (within the emulator). I guess I'll have to dig this a bit more.

I can haz physicz?

2009-09-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

Since these days I am mainly a full-time dad when I get home from the day job, I was somewhat surprised when I completed the integration of Chipmunk physics to my game engine over the long weekend (Labor day FTW!). Needless to said, it is pretty exciting when things are starting to come together after weeks of intense preparations :-)

Like I was saying in my previous post, there's various API to chose from when looking to add real world (2D) physics to your game. I picked Chipmunk mainly because it's in C and relatively simple. My main grip with it, is the lack of a complete, and correct, documentation. I found myself having to dive in its source code to understand or clarify some things, and while it's great to be able to do so, I shouldn't have to. A 3rd party API should be well documented, including comments in the header files! Here's a (lame) example: once you have created a body (cpBody) the API provide a set of functions which allow you to physically manipulate it, such as applying a force on it. The thing is, the wording of the purpose on the function cpBodyApplyForce is a little ambiguous: "Apply (accumulate) the force f on body at a relative offset r from the center of gravity. Both r and f are in world coordinates." ... Is the force applied for a single simulation step or permanently? It turns out that it will be applied at each steps, until all forces on the body are reset (using cpBodyResetForces) ... Maybe it's just me? The mention to "accumulate" should have been enough? Also, the r and f cited are most definitely NOT in world coordinate, but in offset from the body's center of gravity ...

Anyhow, overall Chipmunk physics is a big win, I could have grabbed Physics for Game Developers at my local book store, but this is saving me time and headache so: Yeah! :-)

Now that two majors items on my engine's to-do list are done with (the first been the rendering), I'm moving on to handling user inputs, which by it-self isn't that hard, but I'd like to be able to detect the basic gestures that we, as iPhone users, are used to: flicking and pinching. I'm not sure if I need them for the first game I have planned, but ... since I'm doing a game framework, mind as well try to be as complete as possible! At least, I'll need to provision for gestures handling even if I leave the detection for a later version of the framework ... That's one of the malediction of being a framework kind of guy, most of your time is spend on the framework rather than the end result ...

Ping!

2009-09-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

Hello dear readers (yes, the two of you)! Well I'm still around and kicking as you may have seen if you follow me on Twitter. I'd like to said that I have been über busy with making cool iPhone apps, but it will not be exactly accurate. I'm working on a couple of apps, that is true, but the reason that I haven't posted since June as more to do with the lack of interesting things to said (can't always blame Twitter ...). I'll try to improve this over the coming weeks (year right ...) even though idiotic rambling on this blog have never stopped me before ;-)

So, let's talk a bit about one of the project I'm working on: an iPhone game. Yep that's right, a video game. Now, this is my first game (I'll skip the lame ones I wrote in BASIC back in the days or the ones for my pocket calculators) so this is a brand new experience for me and so far I'm loving it :-)

Since I suffer from the NIH syndrome, I'm building my own game framework to support the development of this game (and others to follow hopefully!), when I could have just use one of the existing framework, such as the widely popular Cocos2D. My needs are pretty simple really as I'm making a 2D retrogaming style game (using OpenGL). I could have save myself the trouble, but since I thrive for challenges and enjoy learning stuff, I though it'll be more fun that way. And it is! :P

Yeah now, I'm not totally insane, so I have integrated Chipmunk physics into the engine, instead of spending the next months banging my heads on complex math&physic problems. Here again, there is a lot of physics frameworks to choose from, like Box2D, but I wanted something simple and in C (so that it'll be easier to integrate with my Objective-C based engine).

Anyway, things are looking good at this point although I'm mostly working on the game engine, while the game concept is maturing in my head (with some great inputs from experienced game developer @madgarden). Unlike many other iPhone developers, like Owen Goss, I'm a little hesitant to reveal too much about the game itself, at least until it is well advanced. It's not that I'm working on a revolutionary game (far from it, really!), but the competition is fierce on the App Store! Since I have no idea how long it is going to take me to complete it, I rather not be beaten to the store if you see what I mean (even though there's already similar game in the store) ;-)

It's Twitter's fault!

2009-06-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

Alright, alright ... it's not totally Twitter's fault, but yeah my blogging has definitely taken a serious hit since I joined the twitterverse, and since nothing really exciting have happened, there was nothing much to report.

Anyhow, so our first iPhone app have been on the store for over 2 weeks now, and as expected, it is not exactly flying off the shelves, but we still made 55 sales in the first 2 weeks. Which is not too bad :-) I'll definitely won't be quitting the day job any times soon, but it's a nice feeling to know that around the world there is people using our app, and that they are happy about it (hopefully).

So, what's NeXT? Well, it's not set in stone yet, but we have two apps idea which need more preparatory work. I'm also pretty excited about finally getting and iPhone (3GS FTW!) this coming Friday (if I can get one ...). I'm not overly happy about enslaving myself to Rogers, but the choice is limited here in Canada ...

We're in! ... well almost.

2009-05-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

After 17 days in review, our first iPhone app was accepted yesterday afternoon. It took that long because the first version we submitted on May 2nd was rejected (after 7 days) for HIG violation. Apple wasn't happy with us using a Disclosure Button to lead to a simple UIAlertView, when this type of button should invoke the display of a new view.

To be honest, we though this may be an issue. However, this was the button that made the most sense in the context (we're diclosing extra information) and sliding a new view was just wasteful since we only had 2 lines of info to disclose. Anyhow, their suggestion was to use a custom icon instead, and that's what we did. At first, we considered using the built-in Information button (e.g UIButtonTypeInfoDark), but then we though that since that is associated (incorrectly when you think about it ...) with Settings, we were going to get barred entrance to Apple's walled (lush) garden. So instead, Susan quickly created our own version of an Information button, similar to Apple's one, and yet different enough to avoid confusion (ahem ...) :

Soooo ... where can you get this new revolutionary app? Why in the App Store, of course! ... NOT! Unfortunatly, our Sales Contract is still in process (+3 weeks and counting ...) so the Application is now pending contract ... When will it be? Who knows ... :-(

Better late than never ...

2009-05-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

If you happens to be following me on Twitter (and reading this blog? No way!) you probably already know that we have finally submitted our first iPhone application this past Saturday. Yup, that's right, the very same application I have been talking about since November! iTunes App Store here we come! ...

Contraction Tracker is, more or less, a basic contraction timer, designed to be used in the days/hours leading to the delivery of a baby. Nothing game changing here, sadly. But it's a start, and it was written mainly for our own use. Back in November, there was only an handful of similar applications on the store (2 to be precise). None were quite what we wanted, so making our own was most definitely a good idea (especially since it allowed us to get acquainted with the platform). Unfortunately, once the baby arrived, the time I could spare to work on the app dropped from 2-3 hours daily to a mere 30 minutes per days, on lucky days. That is the main reason why it took us soooo long to go from almost finished app (late November) to released app (early May). Sadly, today there is much more similar app available (10 including ours), so the competition is going to be fierce ... that's what you get for being slow to deliver! :-|

Now, of course, the submission euphoria is gone, and have been replaced by anxiety: How long will the review process take? Will we get (paid) customers? Have we left any embarrassing bugs behind? ... and of course the ultimate question faced by thousands of developers on a daily basis: Will we be rejected by Apple?

In case you are wondering, allo the application's icons were made for us by Alex Ventpap (alexventpap on Twitter) which we definitely recommend for iPhone artwork, among other things.

Release Candidate!

2009-04-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

Yay! Finally! [Redacted] is officially in its "Release Candidate" form. Man, this has been a long road ... I'm planning to do a Postmortem post here once it is on the App Store. The plan is to submit it this coming week-end, for review. If everything check out and that Apple respect it's advertised delays, the app should be for sale within 7 days. Since it's a relatively simple application, which does not walk on the borderline of the SDK agreement, I'm hoping the acceptance will be swift ... but then again who knows what's going on within the wall of the App Store review office(s).

Tomorrow is the Vancouver iPhone Developers meetup downtown. I'm looking forward to it. I'm a bit nervous though. I haven't been to any developer oriented event for years! The last one I attended was a BeOS meeting in Paris back in 2000 (or was it 2001?) ...

Clueless predictions

2009-03-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, all my predictions from yesterday turned out to be just a wishes list. Turns out, I had in mind 3.0 to be matching the Pre offering ... but it just wasn't the case. Either Apple can't, or more likely they just don't care, meaning they don't see Palm as the mobile version of the anti-Christ. As eloquently put in this article, Apple's fixation on avoiding background processes, is causing us, the users, some usabilities PITA.

Anyway, I still think we will see some application switching support in OS 3.0 .... but only on the new version of the iPhone, rumored for this summer. As often, Steve Jobs will casually announce it with some smug comments about some power (but clueless) users wanting it very bad, so here it is but we don't like it much ... (e.g MacBook Pro 17" with mate display option).

Mandatory predictions

2009-03-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

With now less than two hours to go before the iPhone OS 3.0 event, I think it is time for me to join the geek creed and make a couple of (clueless) predictions. Still I don't have John Gruber's writing style, nor insight, I'll keep these shorts and to the point.

So what to expect? Well since there is now a real challenger to the iPhone (that'll be the Palm Pre), Apple has to play catch-up and show that 3.0 will have all the goodies (and more, hopefully) than the Pre. Sounds pretty obvious isn' it? Well yeah it is. CNNMoney has a little write-up of the details of what to expect, here.

So then, what is/are my prediction(s)? Well here they are:

The multitasking (don't really like to use that term, 'cause technically the iPhone OS is already multitasking) will not be available unless you are using the new iPhone to come out in June (or it will be available on older HW, but with a limitation of said 2 users launched applications and you will have to enable it via some hidden setting). The reason for this isn't much about hardware limitation, but giving you reason to upgrade to the new iPhone, which will come with a faster CPU/GPU (just stating the obvious here) and 256Mb of RAM (instead of 128Mb currently).
Background application will be supported, but wont be based on UIApplication (let's call it UITask) and will have limitations on what they can do.
The OS will allow applications to exchange data (by using files in a common area and/or IPC
The new SDK will support building app with web technologies (a la Mojo)

Wishes list or predictions? Only 90 minutes to go before we found out!

Tweeting!

2009-03-06T09:00:00.000-08:00

@All I finally succumbed to the Twitter temptation and created an account for myself (please follow me! ... please, pretty please?). Originaly, my motivation for doing so, was to follow some of the blog authors I read and some of the Cocoa/iPhone world celebrities (e.g Wil Shipley), but then I caught the tweeting bug and I have been tweeting (mostly non-sense and everyday stuff) furiously.

So what can you expect from following me? Pretty much the same kind of stuff that I blog about here: Cocoa, iPhone, Space, (weird) Music, books etc ... but in a more condenced form (for obvious reasons).

Time fly

2009-03-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Well, March has arrived, and I'm back at (my day) work (since yesterday). Our iPhone app is not yet finished (hard to believe I know ... and yet here we are), so the month have gone without any submission to the app store, contrary to what we were hoping for. Maybe in a couple of weeks? Two things have colluded to cause this schedule slip: feature creep and usability concerns. Concerns is maybe a bit too strong of a word, really. Let said that the UI wasn't as good as it could be.

Late CodeSigning

2009-02-17T10:36:00.000-08:00

Just for fun, I decided last night after 9:30PM to install the latest WIP of our iPhone app on my wife's 2G iPod touch. In order to that, I first tried to modify the provisioning profile so to include the new device in it, but that didn't work too well. Even after having removed completely (or so I though) the said profile from her device and mine (and from the IDE's organizer) and created a new one (following the how-to instructions from the SDK developer portal), I could still not recompile the application. The error reported (in red, mind you) by Xcode being:

CodeSign error: a valid provisioning profile is required for product type 'Application' in SDK 'Device - iPhone OS 2.2'

By then, since it was well after 10pm, way past the baby bed time (and ours ...) , I had to close shop for the night. Problem is that closing the lid of the laptop doesn't mean one's mind isn't going to keep thinking about the problem ... well into the wee hours of the night. Hopefully, when I woke-up this morning (I'm gonna need a nap this afternoon!), I had an idea: Maybe, somewhere inside the project files, references to the old profile were still present? This turned out to be a correct theory (!), for when I grep-ed the project.pbxproj file for PROVISIONING_PROFILE, I found some references to the old profile. A simple copy&paste (BTW I use Smultron for such text editing tasks) of the profile identifier fixed the issue and shortly after, Susan's iPod was running our app :-)

2Busy2Blog!

2009-02-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Since I'm now half-way trough my parental leave, it is time to review a bit what I have been up to, which is mostly coding and parenting ... but mainly the latter. Nevertheless, our iPhone app is getting closer and closer to be ready. I swapped successfully the old data management stuff for the soup thing I was talking about in my previous post, and so far it's working pretty well. I also, followed the advice of Tweetie's author (Loren Brichter) and replaced the five UITextView objects I was using in my UITableView cell by a single UIView (drawing by hand the content). The speed-up is great, there is no longer that impression of lag when flicking up or down, it is amazingly cunning :-)

There is two videos (youtube) I'd like to share with you today. The first one is from a concert of Terje Isungset, who use ice to make (somewhat weird, but oh so lovely!) music (courtesy of The Signal's blog):

The second video shows a simulated depiction of the Phobos -Grunt Russian mission. Pretty cool (and bold) mission I must said. Let's hope it'll get to fly:

Anyway, gotta go change diaper now. So long for now.

Parental Leave

2009-02-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the first day of my month long parental leave. While the main purpose of it is to gives me and the baby time for some more quality bounding, the hidden agenda is to try to finish-up that iPhone application which we had been working on a while ago ... Parental duties and paid job, have so far colluded into putting that project on the back (waaaay back) burner. Or so it looks like. Non-obstante the fact that indeed, my (precious) geeking time had been slashed ten-fold by the arrival of the Baby, I also wasted the few minutes I could saves here and there, on trying to come up with a better way to save my application data. Since we were in a rush to get the app usable by the time we needed it, I had hacked my model so that the data (in a form of 3 arrays plus some metadata) were been stored using a NSKeyedArchiver, and fetched from it when the application was launched. That naive solution had two major issues: it was keeping in memory data that were not used, and it was putting the newly entered data at risk, since a crash of the application will (and did ...) prevent its data to be written to the disk.

To store permanent data on the device, there is 3 common possibilities: flat binary file, NSKeyedArchiver and SQLLite3. To store a limited amount of data, I personally found SQL (even Lite!) to be overkill and not that practical when dealing with objects (yes, I do know about Jeff Lamarche's project and the iPhoneLite3 project), thus I have been working on my own object persistence framework, which won't be as efficient as using SQLLite for backend (well I'm not that good!) , but will serve its purpose for this app and the others to come (hopefully!). Since I'm an ex-Newton user and developer, I couldn't help but inspire myself, rather heavily, off the Newton's Soup ...

Plamwashed?

2009-01-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

Couple of days ago, I was hanging out on the #webOS channel (IRC), when the conversation moved onto Apple's IP threats. Now, I mostly hang-out there because I know some folks that now work for Palm (and on the Pre), and not because I'm a Palm user or developer (in fact quite the opposite). Anyhow, during the conversation, I had to (kindly) correct one of the participant (clearly re-educated by Palm's political police) who believed the Palm Pilot to have come before the Apple's Newton ... Not only was the first Newton (OMP100) introduced close to 3 years before the first Pilot (Pilot 1000), but also the term PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) itself, was coined by John Sculley, then CEO of Apple.

To be fair to the Pilot, I just don't think both devices are comparable. The Original MessagePad, even with its laughable handwriting recognition, packed much more punch and capabilities than what Palm could delivers 3 years later! The same extends to the late MessagePads, which more than 10 years after its introduction, still simply rocks and is still been used by thousands. around the worlds (including yours truly up to June 2008). How many PalmPilot Personal are still been used in 2009? ....

Don't believe the Newton can still be useful? Check this article made by cnet.co.uk back in 2006, in which the Newton came out as the winner when compared to an UMPC!!

(Edit: the Casio/Tandy Zoomer did beat the OMP release by 2 months, and thus it is considered the first PDA. Palm Computing contribution to it was the Personal Information Management (PIM) software).

Insanely Great!

2009-01-24T07:25:00.000-08:00

What better way to celebrate the first computer for the rest of us, than doing so by watching a part of Steve Jobs' keynote?

1984

2009-01-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Since we are only 1 day away of the 25th anniversary of the Apple's Macintosh release, it is time for me to indulge into a little bit of nostalgia and go back to January 1984 ... Back then, I was only 2 weeks shy of been 10 years old, and the personal computer revolution was in full swing (yes, even in France!). I probably wasn't aware of the new Macintosh and its game changing Graphical User Interface, but I was already been titillated by computers and programming, thanks to my dad whom was very much into it, albeit in mobile computing. Mobile computing? In 1984? Well back then it was called pocket computing, and my dad's favorite toy was his trusty Casio FX-702P (which he was using also for work) and he was fully equipped with tape recorder and the tiny thermal printer with its funky metallic like paper. The 702 was indeed great, and I myself falled in love with it in the following years when it was handed down to me. To the point that I used to carry it around (in its little pouch) with me everywhere. Not contempt to just being geeking on his calculator, my dad was also a member of the local computer club, where I had my first encounters with top of the line computers such as the ZX Spectrum, Oric Atmos, Apple IIc, Matra Alice and VG 5000. The later eventually became my very first personal computer (for christmas '84 I guess) for countless hours of gaming and BASIC programming. My dad, back then, had subscription to two french computer magazines (both long gone) which had tons of little programs to be typed in (yep, that's right typed in, not loaded!), so it was possible to spend lots of time on the computer without actually doing much of anything except entering the code. Trying to run it was always a bit of a frustrating experience since there was very often errors in the code which were making it un-workable (that and/or typing mistakes made by little fingers ...). Anyhow, my first encounter with what I'll call a modern computer didn't occurs until late '86, when a school friend got a Macintosh Plus, which we used to do the school newspaper on.

Did I knew back then that computer was what I wanted to do when I grew up? I like to said yes (of course) but unfortunatly it's not the case. I didn't really get into computers until the late 80s, and only decided to make it my profession in 92. Up to that point, all I really wanted to be was either a Naval officer or an Archeologist (the later was likely due to that romatic image of archeology imprinted in my mind by waaaay too much of Indiana Jones) ...

As for the very famous 1984 commercial, well I never saw it until years after the event. To be honest I don't think it was ever aired in France (I could be wrong though) ...

Book worming!

2009-01-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

When people asks me who is my favorite author (like once every 5 years or so), I'm usually very quick in replying: "Well, Umberto Eco of course!". Then, I get a blank stare from my questioner, at least until I mention that he's the author of The Name of the Rose, which movie version had Sean Connery on the cast ... As far as I can tell, his popularity in North America isn't as good as it is in Europe ... or maybe I just happen to know about him because I was introduced to his novels by my dad ... With only 5 novels on track record, it is no real surprise (really) that most people will have not heard of him, unless you are an Italian medievalist, a semiotician, or a philosopher. Anyhow, I finished his last (really his last apparently) novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Saturday night with mixed feelings. I did enjoy the usual display of erudition, which is so typical of Mr Eco work (Dan Brown's an amateur in comparison!) ... but I failed to really found myself spellbound by the story as I had in past readings (e.g Foucault's Pendulum). Yet, it was a welcome change of scenery in this times of interrupted sleep and diaper changing duties ...

Spacecraft get artsy ...

2009-01-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

What does the Kaguya lunar orbiter and the CBC Radio 2's show The Signal have in common? They both play weird and yet (sometimes) tantalizing "music"! Some crazy folks over at JAXA are using the laser altimeter's data from the spacecraft to generate music based on the relief of the moon: Moonbell. Isn't it cool?

Palm and its Mojo ...

2009-01-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

When I first saw that Palm's Pre SDK was called Mojo, I couldn't beleive that will pick such a ridiculous name for their brand new platform. I mean come-on Palm, Mojo!?! Yeah we get it, like Austin Powers you got your Mojo back ... It will be more than fine for an internal codename, but for a public name? Not very classy ... Then, there is the whole thing about the framework been based on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. How many mobile developers knows theses, or have time and will to learn them? Apple got a a lot of flak from the developers community from using Objective-C on its mobile platform, which only a small (tiny?) fraction of the developers (most of which live in the Mac platform ghetto) knows ... and it's a C superset!!! At the risk of sounding like an a$$, I'll like to said that web developer != software developer ... experience, education and skills are usualy very different. But maybe, that's what Palm is after? A platform where applications are quick and easy to hack and release?

Palm's Nova ... #2

2009-01-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

It's out and in the open, and it's called webOS! gdgt.com has a live feed of the keynote. Looks good, rather iPhone-ish but with some nice features (e.g app switching) ... but HTML, CSS, and javascript for dev tools? Surely there will be some sort of C API ...

Palm's Nova ...

2009-01-08T08:25:00.000-08:00

Well today is the day where Palm is supposed to announce, at the CES, its new OS (Linux based apparently) which should compete with the iPhone. Not much have leaked so far on what to expect (somehow this sounds like an Apple's operation), so there is not much to said for now. I'm not very warm to Palm, mainly because the Palm Pilot is somewhat responsible for the (inevitable?) demise of my beloved Newton (smaller & cheaper devices which didn't do a quarter of what the Newt' could do). It's not that I didn't try to like them, since I got myself (I know! What was I thinking!) a Palm Tungsten T3 back in 2004. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), there was no spark between us. The device it-self was alright I guess, but the OS left me cold, uninterested and the unit ended-up collecting dust on my desk for years, unused.

10 years of OS X (sort of)

2009-01-06T13:25:00.000-08:00

Well, this beginning of year is sure full of anniversaries. Few days ago it was the Mars Rover, and yesterday it was the release of Mac OS X Server which occurred 10 years ago. Oops ... did I wrote release? I meant announce ... Stories of Apple.net has a bit more detail on it (including a link to a screenshot, sure did look like OS9 ...). The very same Macworld keynote was also used to introduce the Blue&White PowerMac G3 with that funky look which at that time looks pretty darn cool but now look, well ... very late 90s ...

While I'm still talking (a bit) about the MER, I must mention that one of Spirit's drivers (Scott Maxwell) have started (to celebrate the anniversary) a very interesting (and well written) blog on the first 3 years on Mars of the rovers. Each daily post will be covering a martian day (sol).

Scott participated in August to some sort of conference, which is now on Youtube

5 years on Mars!

2009-01-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

Well here we are, January 2009. 5 years ago, the first of the two MER, Spirit, was landing on Mars. I still recall, although it's getting a little fuzzy in my memory, watching the event LIVE on NASA TV. It was great in a nerdy sort of way :-) 5 years after, what was suppose to last only 90 Martian days, have lasted +1773 days, quite the endurance.

Mass Digital which was behind a video of the EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) have released some time ago a video on YouTube showing the whole mission (well not the ALL mission) :

It sure looks a little dated now, especially if you compare with the HD video of MSL's EDL, but it is still pretty fun to watch. Speaking of fun, Emily, of the Planetary Society, have written up a little article on the excellent adventure of Spirit, worth reading. I'm sure there will be lot of articles to come out this week on the subject.

When too much is too much ... #2

2008-12-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

I'm finally putting the final touches to my NSKeyedArchiver/NSKeyedUnarchiver replacement. It's not that it's a complex things to do really, it's just that finding the time to do it with a 4 weeks old baby around is I found, a major challenge. Overall, I'm satisfied by how my archiver is doing since it's packing that simple object (1 uint + 1 float) I was talking about in my previous post into 44 bytes instead of the wasteful 232 bytes of NSKeyedArchiver (while still supporting keyed encoding, of course). That 44 bytes include a preamble which ,when needed, could be skipped, for example when storing a collection of objects into a same file, so the archived object really only take 35 bytes, which isn't bad all considered :-)

Mars Pathfinder

2008-12-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

11 years ago, like many other space geeks, I was captivated by the Mars Pathfinder mission. It was the very first mission to have an Internet coverage (If I'm not mistaken), and it was also (of course) the first mission to feature a rover (only 10kg, compare this to MSL's 900kg!). Looking back at the mission pictures, it's amazing how we have grown accustomed to high-res imagery from the twin MER, to the point that pictures from their older cousin seems amateurish (likely your cell phone, an iPhone hopefully, as now a better resolution than Pathfinder's cameras had).

Anyhow, I'm talking about this today, 'cause I stumbled on a couple of YouTube videos, which are part of a 35 minutes documentary on the mission, which I though was good enough to share. So here are, in order, the 4 segments:

From Newton to iPhone ...

2008-12-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

As nicely pointed out by John Gruber on his blog, Deep Green is back (from the dead)! As soon as I saw that, I rushed to the App store and grabbed it (for it's introductory price of $4.99) mostly for pure nostalgia reason since I had it on my trusty Newton, even though I'm not a big Chess player (I do play occasionally). The iPhone's version, which is coming out 10 years after the Newton's version, is seriously beautiful and sports a nice minimalist UI. Well done Joachim Bondo! I'v got to said that it is nice to see a Newton old-timer transitionning to the platform :-)

When too much is too much ...

2008-12-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

To store the data generated with my iPhone application, I have been using the facilities provided by the NSCoding protocol in cooperation with a NSKeyedArchiver, and it works quiet well even if it is likely not what I should be using since it force all my data to be saved or loaded all at once. Nevertheless at this stage in the development process, this is a good enough solution since my data-set is relatively small (less than 30 items). The whole concept of archiving object isn't new to me since I was using it back in my BeOS days (BMessage with the BArchivable class), however the NeXT's take on this old favorite is a little much more handy to use, thanks to Objective-C dynamic nature (compared to C++ more rigid nature) . Since the name of the class is archived at the same time than the object data, it can be later used to recreate the object automatically (granted that the executable unarchiving your object knows about that particular class).

Unfortunately, there is (of course) a price to paid for using NSKeyedArchiver. The end result bytes consumption is criminally high. For example a simple NSObject derived class, encoding a uint and a float, requires a 232 bytes long buffer. 8 bytes of real data (not counting the class name), flattened into 232 bytes ... So obviously, lots of the overhead won't be duplicated if I was encoding more than a single object, but if you want to archive a single object for transmission or storage (bytes oriented kind of storage), the cost is a little too high.

Hopefuly, since the NSCoding protocol is based on using the abstract class NSCoder, one could create its own archiver, with hopefully similar capabilities, but lower memory footprint. I know, I shouldn't waste my (limited) time making my own, and instead focus on the app, but I can't help ...

Happy b-day, Mouse!

2008-12-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

Well, the mouse is officially turning 40 years old today. Well, to be exact, it's a little more than 40 years old, since it was first publicly demonstrated 40 years ago by Douglas Engelbart during what is now known as the Mother of all Demos. If you have 74 minutes to spare, make sure to watch the video of that demo from some pretty cool stuff ... that is if you are digging computing archeology ;-)

While, I'm on the subject, I'd like to point out also, an interesting interview of the legendary John Draper, which was recently published on Stories of Apple. The interview mainly focus on the early days of Phreaking and Apple, but here's an excerpt related to the main preoccupation of this blog (no, it's just not about weird music!):

"Yeah, it’s wired up, man. Fuckin’ wired up man. [...] It was borrowed from NeXT. Jobs owned all the code from NeXT, he brought it in to Apple. It’s part of Xcode, part of Cocoa."

Über fiasco ...

2008-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

I was feeling pretty confident when the contractions started to come, because I had my little app on my iPod to deal with them, and somehow help with the excruciating pain which was to build-up over the course of several hours ... that is until I realized, with horror and tremendous shame, that it kept on crashing. Of course, this was purely my fault. Just the day before, we had a perfectly working application. Sure, it was far from perfect, and there was a lot of polishing still to be done, but it had been tested and was fulfilling its purpose. I should have avoid touching anything since we were getting close to the due date, and thus we could need it at any time. And yet, on the morning of the 19th, I decided to start implementing some of the changes Susan and I had talked about. I was so certain that my changes will have minimum impact, and that we will have time to re-test it, that I didn't even register that I was stomping all over one of the most fundamental law in life: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!". The results of my risky endeavour, was a fiasco (the baby still made it out A-Okay, so not everything bombed).

What is even more annoying, is the cause of the crash was pretty dumb, and only took a couple of second to figure out. If I had run into it while testing the app within Xcode, I will have seen it within the debugger.

Alas ... lesson harshly learned.

Über coolness ...

2008-11-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning, I managed to get my app on my iPod. I was rather nervous about the whole process after reading various horror stories from fellow iPhone developers, but my worst fears didn't materialize. Lucky me I guess ... I followed religiously the howto sections of the developers' site to provision my device then get my certificate stuff in order and things were going well, until I ran into the first issue: there is no NSCalendarDate on the device (bummer!). Now, this is really my fault since I failed to paid attention to the fact that, as stated in the documentation, that particular class is on its way to be deprecated ... and missing from the iPhone OS. The surprising thing, though, is that that class is available when targeting the simulator ... Anyhow, that wasn't a huge drama and after a bit of cleanup, I was onto the next issues: the dreaded 0xE800003A and 0xE8000036 ... errors :-|

The first one, is easy to fix after a bit of googling as for the second one, it is also kinda easy to fix since it only occurs when I try to install a new built over an older one. When it occurs, which isn't all the time but rather often (read 9 out of 10), I just delete the older version from the home screen, before hitting Build & Go or Go. Which is a bit of a bummer 'cause each time I lose whatever state & data my app was in ... :-(

Anyhow, now that the app is on the device we are finally ready for our big event ... and with enough time to spare so that we have been improving the app ;-)

What the heck are you listening to?

2008-11-17T15:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a little something I'd like to share with you (yes, that's you Usman), and for once, it's not something that I have heard on the The Signal, but rather something I stumbled upon in Cult Of Mac of all place. Be ready, though, for some extremely "weird" music:

Unfortunatly, there doesn't seems to be any available audio files on the SLOrk project site ...

Not so fast ...

2008-11-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

Well, we finally got approved yesterday afternoon in the iPhone developer program :-) Which is pretty cool, I must confess. I have yet to go trough the (possibly) grueling process of getting the application on my iPod, but I should be doing that this evening (an blogging about it, unfortunatly for you ...).

Susan did a test run of the app using the simulator the other day, and she came up with a detailed list of bugs and changes, which keept me busy over the past 48 hours. It's not that it was much work, really, it's just that I have only a limited amount of hours each days ...

Kind of done ...

2008-11-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

I sort of completed my first iPhone app yesterday. It's nothing fancy, really, but it's something we were in imminent need for. Since I only applied for enrollment in the iPhone developer program back on October 29th, I have yet to put the app on my iPod touch for testing. I sure hope we get accepted ASAP so that we can do a real life test ...

The experience has been very fun, so far. For a mobile device, the IDE (Xcode) and the API (Cocoa Touch) are pretty good in comparison to what I was used on Symbian (CodeWarrior). Now, to be fair I should mention that the last time I had to use Symbian stuff was back in 2005. Since I haven't followed-up on it since, I shouldn't really compare both experiences ... yet, coding for the iPhone as so far be a real pleasure where Symbian was a major pain (lacking documentation, constant need for tricks & hacks ...). I have yet to explore the whole touch API, but right now it appears to be consistent and well though-out.

I'm not going to disclose just yet what sort of application we are working on. But I believe it should be fairly easy to guess at it. Post your guesses as comments if you'd like, the winner will get a free version (if and whenever it get released) ;-)

C++ Considered Harmful (?!)

2008-11-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have been following an interesting discussion started a some weeks ago by Eric Raymond on his blog. The subject is a very touchy one as the title of the work ESR is working on (and which motivated his post) is : “Why C++ is Not Our Favorite Programming Language”. As anyone could guess, this post have generated a certain amount of reactions over more than a month. It's overall a great read which I strongly recommend for C++ lovers and haters.

Since I'm in no way the C++ guru (although I have been using it for a good 10 years), I'm confining myself to respectfully taking-in comments from both sides. This doesn't mean that I don't have my opinion on C++ and its supposed harmfulness. Is C++ complex and confusing? Yes, some is. Is C++ syntax tricky? Not so much. As much as possible I try to stay away from all the features I found to add more complications that their are really worth (e.g Templates, iostream ...). In fact, I'm really using C++ in the way it first came about : C with objects.

While I'm on the C++ subject, Kevlin Henney recently (March of this year) participated to a Google Tech Talk, in which he talked about C++ Stylistics. A good talk worth watching IMHO:

As I have been moving away from C++ (on to Objective-C), I have become a bit more critical of C++ lately. I guess I'm having too much fun with Objective-C and Cocoa to be really language agnostic anymore ... so C++? Yuk!

The other Saturn ...

2008-11-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

While most people on Earth have heard of the mighty Saturn V (except maybe the lost tribe of Amazonia ...), very few people (except the space geeks) knows about the Saturn's older sibling: the less mighty (but yet impressive) Saturn I. Check out this video for some incredible (and yet not seen often) footage of the propellant tank, and staging cameras:

Thanks to NASASpaceFlight.com's forum member Proponent, for pointing out that superbe video of the 5th flight (SA-5).

C'est plein d'Étoiles ...

2008-10-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm done obsessing about how soon my MacBook will get to me, it's time to turn to something else to look forward. Luckily for my OCD afflicted mind, the Étoilé team have announced 3 days ago that a new version will be available on the 31st (of this month) with hopefully an easy to install set of packages for the popular Linux distributions. Which is a pretty cool news for me, since I still have a PC (as in IBM clone) at home on which I'd love to put something that look modern (unlike, ahem ... GNUStep) and yet use the very same paradigms that I have been getting use to recently (OpenStep/Cocoa and Objective-C). This could allow for some pretty neafty cross-platform apps.

I meant no offense to GNUStep, of course. It's great to be able to copy code across from a Mac and have it compile and run on Linux (as long as you stay away from things too Mac specific such as Core Graphics). The problem is that the UI layer (NeXTStep's look&feel) is very dated (to say the least). That's why Étoilé is such an interesting project (which btw is not limited to just providing a new UI front-end).

Now, what will be über cool, it's to run that environment on top of PureDarwin, the newest attempt to bring Darwin to the non-Mac users :-)

MacBooking

2008-10-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

So the MacBook I ordered back on the 15th finally made it to Vancouver this past Friday after a 7 days journey which took it from the banks of the Yangtze river to the Kansai region, then across the Pacific ocean to Alaska, Kentucky, Ontario, Aberta and finally British Columbia ... Way to keep the carbon footprint low there, UPS 9_9

Anyhow ... So far, I'm extremely pleased with the new MacBook. I was a bit worry when I got home Friday, that I may experience some of the issues I had heard about on the MacRumors.com's forums, but luckily non applied (dead pixels, loose battery cover, scratches, bent screen) to my unit (so far at least). In fact, I'm more than pleased: I love it! .. and for the following simple reasons:

Small and yet very usable
Sturdy and stylish (feel like a slab of metal)
Nice screen (yeah there some reflections but it's not really a major issue for me at least ...)
Great battery life
Nice keyboard

Now, it's not (yet) all lovy dovy:

Hang on me a couple of time
Can't seems to be able to get the # character, it keep showing up as £ (WTF?)
Plugged an external-screen to it and the MacBook display froze (it was still working but the unit own display wasn't, not was the external display)
The trackpad is tricky to use (maybe that's just me)

Okay, we get it Apple ...

2008-10-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

Like many people, I find the Get a Mac ads that Apple have been running since 2006, amusing. Poking fun of Windows and Microsoft while showing the many advantages of the Mac, was a great idea ... The problem is that lately the ads have been solely bullying Vista without showing anything that is related to how the Mac works nor make things easier for its users. Unless I'm mistaken, the last ads to have been really on the subject was "Office Stress", announcing the release of the new version of Office for Mac ... that's 10 ads ago. One may argue that "Off the Air" was kinda on the subject too (4 ads ago) ... but not really. Sure it's great that the Genius in the store can help transfer files from PC to Mac when switching, but that's no big deal (in my books at least).

October 20th, 1997

2008-10-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Today is a big day for the few of us for which this matter ... 11 years ago, to the day, the last of the Apple's Newton (MessagePad 2100) was introduced. Until I got my iPod touch back in June of this year, my trusty Newton had been my main PDA since March 1998. It is by far the oldest piece of technology I own that is still in working order (followed by my old Vaio laptop runing BeOS).

Even tough I like very much the new Apple's mobile platform, I still think that the Newton is, in many ways, still ahead of anything else when it comes to low-power, mobile software usage. I know it's hard to beleive if you have never used one ...

Prepared for Shipment ...

2008-10-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm bound to look somewhat silly (as usual), since just a few days ago, I was mostly hostile towards the new supposed look of the Apple's notebook. I changed my mind and ordered the 2.4Ghz MacBook ... The notebook looked much better during the event and on Apple's official pictures, than it did on the leaked shots ... and this new version is more than ever more akin to a small MacBook Pro than the old MacBook. Since I was on the market to replace our aging iBook G3 ... it looked like a very good deal and the reviews so far are mainly (very) positive. Can't wait to hold it in my arms! ... err, I mean start using it!

Pre Apple event blues ...

2008-10-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

I have been holding out on replacing my old iBook (2003) with a MacBook (Pro?) since there was a rumor (confirmed last week) of a refreshment of the line. As usual, rumors have gone wild over the couple of days leading to today's event. The latest round of spy-like activities, spured some fuzzy pictures of what is rumored to be the new MacBook Pro ... And I sure hope this is a fake, 'cause I don't like what I see, nor what I read about some models of the line been left un-touched by the update. What kind of #%&@ed-up update will that be?? ... Maybe I should grab one of the current MBP at my local Best Buy before they get replaced by a mobile version of the iMac ...

@superfluous #2

2008-10-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

While I'm in whining mood these days (so it seems), let's me talk about a part of Objective-C which I don't like too much: the lack of namespace. This has a unfortunate effect on the way Cocoa can be confusing at time simply because in order to avoid name collision, everyone is prefixing his stuff with some kind of 2 to 3 letters abbreviation. For example, Apple have been using NS since back in the NeXTSTEP days and thus everything in Cocoa is prefixed as such (e.g NSApplication, NSController ...). And this is the problem since at first glance, there is no easy way to tell what a particular keyword is, unless you already know about it. For example, is NSPoint a class? No, it's a structure. NSNumber? a class, NSInteger? a type ... 9_9

Since namespaces are a relatively recent addition to C++, the fact that is missing from Objective-C isn't much of a surprise. However, one may wonders why it has still not been added. In any case, this is somewhat irrelevant, since it is unlikely that Apple will go over Cocoa (and other framework such as Foundation) and make use of some Cocoa namespace; braking everyone code in the process. Alas, something like NS::TInteger, NS::CNumber will have make the developers life a little easier ...

Like our Hungarian friends like to said: A little prefixing can go a long way ...

@superfluous

2008-10-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, I decided to stop my Cocoa musing and focus instead on properly following Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. The idea being that this will give me a more proper initiation to Cocoa, especially on the subject of KVC, KVO and the famous bindings. I started Chapter 8 last night and went through the implementation of the first version of the RaiseMan tutorial. This chapter also introduce the usage of the new Objective-C 2.0 @property, which can be use to automatically create setter and getter methods. Now, it's all good, I don't mind saving some time by writing less code, however I'm running into a bit of a personal conflict with this.

Like many other developers that have been around for sometime, I've grow over the years my own coding style, made up of all the things I have encountered and came to appreciate. One of the thing I find necessary is the prefixing of any variable by a lower case single character which give some clear hint on the origin of the variable (e.g iSomeNumber, aObject, lCount ...). In case you are wondering, I got into that habit from my time on Symbian. Now, there's no problem with using such notation with Cocoa unless you happened to want to define an instance variable as property.

What @synthesize do behind the scene is to generate the setter/getter methods using the name of the instance variable. So far so good. Now, if you happens to name your instance variable something like iSomeSumber, the setter will end up being -setISomeNumber: and the getting -iSomeNumber ... Not very elegant, right? (What I want really is the methods to -setSomeNumber: and -someNumber ... well really, I'd like the getter to be -getSomeNumber ... but that's another issue ...)

Since there is a refactoring tool in Xcode which will generate the setter and getter of a given instance variable, I do find the @property somewhat superfluous (Yes, I do know that the property allow for more than what the current refactoring tool does).

Oops .. I did it again ...

2008-10-08T08:15:00.000-07:00

Microsoft have yet again release some sort of video and as John Gruber put it : What is wrong with this company? Who authorizes this crap? See this for yourself:

Embarrasing to said the least ... kinda like that LHC Rap video ...

Anyhow, RIM announced yesterday its answer to the iPhone, the BlackBerry Storm. What can I said about it except : "yaaaawn". So yeah it's got some touch-screen (but it's not capacitive) and an AppStore, but it lack the slick UI and the Wi-Fi (it's nowhere on the specs). Yes, that's right no Wi-Fi ... "WTF!" exactly what I'm thinking ... Since I can't find any good reason why something as common these days as Wi-Fi will be left-out of a brand new smartphone (and on an iPhone competitor!), I'm going to assume for now that they just forgot to mention it in the specs ... :-|

Avkon Touch

2008-10-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

Nokia finally announced today their answer to Apple's iPhone, the 5800 XpressMusic. engadget.com has a little blurb about it including several pictures of it. Funnily, the author of the post (Chris Ziegler) asks if anyone remember the 7710 ... and I do since I worked on it at Nokia Vancouver back in 2004 (in case you're wondering, I contributed to the Voice Recorder and Paint applications). That phone never made it (AFAIK) to North America. It went on sale in Europe and Asia for only a short time before the project was canned, and Series 90 shelved. Being a contractor, the whole drama didn't have much impact on me really. It was, however, very instructive on the way things work in a company of Nokia's size.

So about that new Touchscreen smartphone? Yeah, it's stylish (as usual for Nokia) ... not sure I like the UI ... It definitly lack a certain je ne sais quoi (the Apple's touch I guess) and doesn't seems to be all that responsive (from what we can see in the videos) ... Oh and it's running Symbian with likely some sort of Avkon Touch ... Yeeeeeeks! That's a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned ;-)

So long NDA ...

2008-10-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

Apple has just announced that it was dropping the NDA which have been in effect for the iPhone SDK since it's public release earlier this year. This is a very good news all around :-) And perfect timing for me since I just wrote my first little "application" for the iPhone last night. Nothing very fancy I must confess, just a port of the first Cocoa example from Aaron Hillegass' book (the random number generator). Unsurprisingly, the more I get to use Interface Builder, the less I'm been hostile to it ... Anyhow, now that the NDA is off, I guess I'll be able to include this side of my daily musing as part of this blog :-)

Speaking of Cocoa Touch, Bill Dudney has an interesting piece on why you should really learn Cocoa for OS X before working on an iPhone (the whole post was NDA friendly).

SECO!

2008-09-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

Since I'm also a Space geek, I did not miss the LIVE broadcast of the 4th flight of SpaceX's Falcon 1 launch vehicle ... It was especially important to see it, since they finally made it to orbit! Yahoooo! Here's a recording (on YouTube) of the live feed for your enjoyment :-)

The Dark Side (TM) clouds everything ...

2008-09-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have been observing for a while now how things are panning out with Apple and the App Store. Since I haven't started developing for the iPhone yet (but soon! I'm starting a new full time job doing just that in 6 days!!, I can't add anything of value to the on-going discussions, except joining the group of bystanders and shaking my head in disbelieve at each moves Apple made. Even thought I always had a soft spot for Apple since my days on an Apple IIc, I'm not naive enough to believe they can do no evil ... especially since they sort of have a proven track record of not always playing fair and square. Lots of fore front bloggers have commented about the whole situation (e.g Daring Fireball, Wil Shipley ...), including the still standing NDA, which have already caused the publishing of a programming book to be canceled. Now, as long as you can stay anonymous (does that really mean anything on Internet these days?), it is not impossible to post details (including tutorials) on Cocoa Touch. It is a bit of a risky endeavour I must said, but very much appreciated by newbies iPhone devs like myself ;-)

On another subject, but still related ... The Technologizer.com web site has an interesting post with a bunch of old to recent Apple's TV ads, make sure to check it out for a bit of nostalgia.

Toying around ... #2

2008-09-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

A few pointless posts ago, I was talking about Nibless Cocoa applications, and how Jeff Johnson, had a ready to use solution for us, Interface Builder cheaters. Jeff's elegant solution is build around using Cocoa NSObject's ability to have a class pose as another class (but it must be a parent class). The trick been to make sure that when the application is starting, the NSBundle created to load the main NIB file does not load it, and instead just pretend to have done so. The method works like a charm (granted that the entry NSMainNibFile in info.plist has been removed), however there is just a little problem: the class method poseAsClass has been deprecated in OS X 10.5 and is not even present in 64-bit Cocoa. I have no idea whatsoever this is been phased-out by Apple. Since a similar facility exists in Objective-C and GNUStep, it's not clear at all why this have to go ... Security concern maybe? Whatever the explanation, I'd like to know ...

So ... since I'm interested in a solution that can work from 10.4 and beyond on PowerPC and Intel, 32-bit as well as 64-bit, I had to go back to the drawing board and come-up with an alternative solution, likely something not as elegant. Hopefully, thanks to Objective-C's dynamic abilities, it is possible to replace on-the-fly a method implementation by another function (as long as it have a compatible signature). Scott Stevenson have made a an excellent post on this, which I used as the base of my solution.

The idea is relatively simple: replace the NSBundle's class method loadNibNamed:owner: by my own implementation function and call the original method only in when necessary. Since I wanted to have this automatically done as part of a special type of application, I derived NSApplication in HZNiblessApplication, implementing its object method init to do the dirty work:

- (id) init {
        
    if ((self = [super init]))
    {      
        Method lMethod = class_getClassMethod([NSBundle class],@selector(loadNibNamed:owner:));
        if(!lMethod)
            NSLog(@"NSBundle+loadNibNamed:owner: not found!");
        else
        {
#if MAC_OS_X_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED > MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_4
            gDefaultNSBundleLoadNibNamed = method_setImplementation(lMethod,(IMP)loadNibNamed);    
#else            
            gDefaultNSBundleLoadNibNamed = lMethod->method_imp;
            lMethod->method_imp = (IMP)loadNibNamed;
#endif            
        }
    }
    
  return self;
}
view rawThis Gist brought to you by GitHub.

As your can see, the method basically retrieve the method within the NSBundle class, and swap its implementation with a function called loadNibNamed. Since we need to call the original method to perform its duty when there is a need to load a bundle, we save the pointer to the function in a global variable named gDefaultNSBundleLoadNibNamed. Let's have a look now on how that replacement function is implemented:

BOOL loadNibNamed(id aObject,SEL aSelector,NSString *aNibNamed,id aOwner)
{   
    if (!aNibNamed && aOwner == NSApp)
        return true;
    else
        return (BOOL)(*gDefaultNSBundleLoadNibNamed)(aObject,aSelector,aNibNamed,aOwner);
}
view rawThis Gist brought to you by GitHub.

From there, all that is needed is to replace the value of the NSPrincipalClass key in the application's info.plist by HZNiblessApplication and get your application delegate to fill in the Application menu from -applicationWillFinishLaunching: ... Okay, yeah I'm simplifying a bit here, but you get the point I'm sure :-P

As you have noticed, I finally figured a way of putting neatly formatted code (hmm ... at least on Firefox) on this blog, courtesy of github.com.

Am I a PC?

2008-09-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has released yesterday its new series of ads, replacing the series started a couple of weeks ago with the comic duo Gates & Seinfeld. I think they are not that bad. Sure, it doesn't said much of why using a PC (instead of a Macintosh) is better, but at least it's not as wild as the previous ads. See for yourself:

Rogue Amoeba's developer Mike Ash, has added an interesting post (one of many in fact) on his blog, regarding his iPhone development story. Very interesting and a little bit scary ... Hopefully for him, what he shared won't fall under the infamous NDA, causing him to loose his developer program seat.

iCapricious

2008-09-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talks on the Apple and iPhone developers communities lately about the issue of what application get to be on the App Store or be rejected from it ... The folks behind The Joy of Tech have summed-up in their hilarious (and yet lovely) usual way:

So far, since there has been only an handful of rejected applications, I don't think it is fair to Apple to said that they are abusing their gate keeper role ... however, since not all developers may be has vocal about their rejection as Podcaster's author ... who knows really?

The Force is weak with this one ...

2008-09-16T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Force Unleashed has been out since yesterday for iPhone/iPod, and without much surprise it's really a huge disappointment, gameplay wise. Don't believe me? Check out this video provided by TouchArcade.com:

Yep ... and it get worst, people that reported having purchased it, said that they were able to complete it 90 minutes ... Sure it's only 10 bucks, but still ... Ah well, what can we do except skip it and spend more time playing with Enigmo ... Now, that's a fun (and yet very geeky) game :-)

Goofing around?

2008-09-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

As I was watching the second of the new Microsoft's Ads last night, I came to realise to my uttermost surprise that I was enjoying it. Yeah, you read it right, I just said that I enjoyed it. Sure, I did find it a little long (over 4 minutes), and I still have no idea where this is all going, but I thought it was goofy and not without a certain charm. Still that won't get me running to my local electronic shop and getting a new PC, nor a copy of Vista ... But maybe that's not the goal of the campaign? What if the intent was to make Microsoft appears less of the evil juggernaut we have come to believe it is? Meditate on this, I will.

One less thing ...

2008-09-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

Since I'm waiting for an update to the MacBook, and that none was announced yesterday, I can't help but feeling disappointed by yesterday Let's rock event. Sure, funky color Nanos and the touch finaly getting a speaker and a physical volume control are good news, but still this was in no way the big deal event which was announce by the PR (how typical ...). Yet, the 2.1 firmware update was released (minus the pre-announced push capability, what happend to that?) and that's a good thing. This time around, Apple was less stingy with details on the update, and so far I have found the UI to be a bit snappier, however 3rd party applications still take, like, ever to load ...

The force (un)leashed

2008-09-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

Like most Star Wars fan that happens to own an iPhone or an iPod touch (my case), I was looking forward to September 16th release of The Force Unleashed. However, after watching a video showing the gameplay ... I'm bitterly disappointed. I was hoping for something similar to Jedi Knight 2 where I could play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice (real name Galen Marek) ... instead it looks like the game will be cinematic and mainly finger gestures based. What's the point of carrying a cool looking light saber around if it's only used to return laser blast? ... Okay so yeah, FPS friendly controls on a device such as this is tricky, but not impossible ...

While I am on this subject, I should mention that I been reading Timothy Zahn's first sequel to Episode VI: Heir to the Empire. So far it is okay ... nothing exceptional really, but it's not too bad either. It is the first time that I'm reading a Star Wars expanded universe book. Since I had some downtime between Dune's universe books I thought I gave that a try.

The bleh 2

2008-09-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

I was saving this post for some report on my Cocoa progress, but instead I feel like I should add my voice to the many that have commented on the new CBC Radio 2, which launched yesterday. I have to admit that I had missed the announce of the changes to come from a few months ago, so I only noticed that something was coming up over the week-end. Since the start of September is a common time for program changes on Radio (or TV) I wasn't too surprise ... but I wasn't really expecting the only radio I have been listening to since I moved to Canada 5 years ago, to change so much ... and not for the best, sadly.

So what happened you may ask? Well ... to sum-up, Radio 2 which use to be mainly Classical and Jazz, got stuffed with a large part of the Radio 3 playlists. Now don't get me wrong, there nothing wrong with Radio 3, in fact I have enjoyed it since the very first podcast of Grant Lawrence back in 2005, and I was also very disappointed when the fun take-over of Radio 2 airwaves by Radio 3 was terminated over a year ago (Saturday nights).

What's wrong then with Radio 3 taking over Radio 2? Simply put: wrong crowd, wrong time. Let's face it, the large majority of Radio 2's audience isn't the kind that will enjoy The New Pornographers at 7 in the morning ... I can understand that they will have wanted to expose the listeners to some of the new Canadian music, but a better approach will have been, IMHO, to bring minor tweaks to the programing by adding a single show composed of the usual Radio 3 playlist (e.g by shortening Canada Live) ... one hour will have been enough. In fact, the old Radio 3 show on Radio 2 (which I talked about earlier) was perfect to get folks introduced to the new Canadian music tree. Instead, we have 7 hours of it, and Radio 2 now just sounds like any other FM radios ... minus the ads that is.

At least, we still have The Signal ...

Toying around ...

2008-08-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

I purchased on the App Store the game Toy Bot Diaries from local company (Vancouver!) IUGO, after reading the review posted on touchArcade. I can only agree with the author, it's a very sweet deal (nice gaming, low price). Best of all, the game take advantage of the controls native to the platform, and it work out pretty well, except if you are trying to play while lying down ... In this setup, I found the control to not work too well. No big deal really, I shouldn't be playing right before sleeping anyway ... ;-)

Meanwhile, I have been continuing my Cocoa musing without Interface Builder, and banging my head on the (one will think) simple issue of filling the application menu. Hopefully for ma sanity, I came accross Jeff Johnson's blog which have a serie of great posts (and a sample XCode project), on how to create a Nibless application. Turns out it's not as simple as it should be. It's also more akin to hacking the framework than using it ... anyhow it does work.

Before I sign-out, I will like to point to a video from the lastest iPhoneDevCamp, which feature Neil Young's (no, not the singer) keynote on the iPhone as a gaming platform.

Blast them again!

2008-08-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I forgot to talk about the opening of the Clone Wars. Like any other geek watching the show, I was expecting the standard opening of a Star Wars movies with John Williams music and scrolling text ... So I was surprised and somehow deeply disturbed to see the opening not conforming to the canon. In fact, it reminded me a lot of the TV news broadcast in the opening of Starship Troopers ...

Blast them!

2008-08-20T08:35:00.000-07:00

So I went to see the Clone Wars animation last night with an old friend, and I don't know why the "critics" are so harsh about it, 'cause we both enjoyed ourselves (along with the other 10 adults and 25 younglings present). Of course, it probably have to do with the fact that combined we have the mental age of a 12 years old, but still .... it was a fun 90 minutes, filled with lots of action and ... yes, a simple story line. I think it is clear, that the movie was targeted to an audience much younger than the usual Star Wars crowds. As for the CG and animations? Well, it's definitely no Pixar movie, but I do think it was alright even if at time the characters motions were a little stiff.

Speaking of animation movie, I noticed something interesting on the Bagelturf blog, a link to an animation created by a group of student of the French art school Gobelins. Oktapodi is not only funny (in a Pixar shorts sort of way) but also well done, check it out on YouTube:

2.0.2

2008-08-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

Apple blessed us, iPhone and iPod touch owners, yesterday, with a new update. The release note is as usual a trove of details: "Bug fixes" 9_9 ... I seriously don't understand why they can put a bit more details so that people can have an idea of what got fixed or not. We all know, heck, the all world know that 2.0 OS was a very buggy release. Issues have been discussed all over the web! But I guess very few (if any) were acknowledged by Apple. The usual obscurantism at its best.

Once the placebo effect recessive in a couple of days, I'll be able to take note if downloading around 250Mb (!!?) was worth it. But right now, the UI seems a little snappier than it was. However, I haven't noticed any improvement during application launches :-|

NSApplication and delegate #2

2008-08-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

The only reason for that yucky thing I could think off, is that they wanted to save people from having to define and implement all 14 methods each time a NSApplication delegate was needed, even if only one of them was needed. Since the concept of optional method in a Protocol was only introduced recently in Objective-C 2.0, using a protocol for the NSApplicationDelegate (or for NSApplicationNotifications) was I guess not a solution back when NeXTSTEP was been designed and implemented. Still, having to define and implements a bunch of methods isn't much of a huge burden (copy&paste), likely only a couple of them are going to have a real implementation, and the number of application delegate class per application is mainly, well ... one.

I'm aware that adding methods in Objective-C isn't as costly as adding a virtual method to a C++ class, but still ... this is not a very elegant solution. As this thing used all over the place? I'm a little scare to find out ...

BTW, sorry for the sloppy code formatting on my previous posts. I still haven't figured a nice way to present it with proper indentation. Syntax highlighting will be nice too.

NSApplication and delegate

2008-08-15T06:36:00.000-07:00

Last night, I finally restarted my Cocoa learning effort, by looking at how I could write an application without using Interface Builder. IB is so vastly used that there isn't as much details available on the web on how to go about with it, nevertheless, there is enough to get started. And in fact, it is relatively easy, at first.

A Cocoa application, in its simplest expression, is composed of a single NSApplication object and one (or more) NSWindow object(s). Overall, it doesn't take much boiler code to get something going, which is good:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
NSWindow *lWindow;
// create an auto-release pool
NSAutoreleasePool *lPool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

// initializes the display environment and connects to the window server
// and display server
[NSApplication sharedApplication];

// create a window
lWindow = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:NSMakeRect(10,10,320,240)
                             styleMask:kStyle
                               backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered
                                 defer:NO];
// set the window's title
[lWindow setTitle:@"Hello world!"];
// show the window and move it foreground
[lWindow makeKeyAndOrderFront:nil];

// start the application run loop
[NSApp run];

// release the window
[lWindow release];

// release the pool
[lPool release];
}

The Application object gets a bunch of notification from the system during its life-time. If I wanted to perform some actions in some of them, there is two ways of doing it: I could subclass NSApplication and implement the corresponding methods, which is the usual way of doing it in 99% of the toolkits out there ... or, I could follow the Cocoa way and use a delegate instead. Since the later is what Apple encourage developers to do, the NSApplication class is built to support the addition of a delegate by sending it a setDelegate message.

Now, as expected, this message take as single argument: the object to be the delegate. So far so good. However, instead of defining the argument with a specific class, for example something like said NSApplicationDelegate, it is defined as an id (meaning any kind of object). Since I'm still more of a C++ kind of guy than an Objective-C dude, I found myself a little puzzled by this but still decide to move forward by searching in NSApplication.h (since I didn't see anything in the class documentation) for the delegate class I am expecting to have to subclass, or some sort of protocol definition.

In the header file, I was nicely surprised to see that NSApplicationDelegate does exists, but in a way I was not expecting, at all: @interface NSObject(NSApplicationDelegate). Yep, that's right. A category ... meaning that any object with NSObject for root parent, can be the application delegate ... Since 99% of all Cocoa's classes have NSObject as root, any objects can be the delegate .... including widgets! If this isn't yucky, I don't know what is! Why on earth didn't they use a protocol!??

I want(ed) to believe!

2008-08-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

No really, I want to believe so much the up-coming Clone Wars movie isn't going to sucks that I'm ready to like, totaly, forgot about the review published then retracted by Ain't It Cool News. Also, I won't even think about, nor mention the low 44% on the Tomatometer, given by the Rotten Tomatoes self proclamed critics. I found their lack of faith, disturbing. Instead, I'm going to be watching over and over the trailers, and the videos available on the movie site. Since I already watched (by-myself mostly) Episode 1 & 2 this past Sunday afternoon, my Star Wars geek-o-meter readings are off the chart! I can almost feel the force ... can you?

2.0.1

2008-08-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

So I upgraded my iPod touch yesterday morning from 1.1.4 to 2.0.1 ... Since I had a jailbroken unit, I was a bit worry that I may encounter some issues, but the whole process went pretty smoothly. All I had to do was to hit the restore button in iTunes, which installed 1.1.5 and whipped all the apps and data I had installed (no big deal). Once that was done, I bought the 2.0 update from iTunes and that was it.

2.0 OS has been discussed a lot since it came out, so I'm not going to get into any details, I'll just said that, yes the unit does feel more sluggish than 1.1, and yes there's a lot of so-so apps on the App Store. I wishs there was a way to download demo version of some of the game. For example, I bought Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, and I regret it 'cause I don't like it that much (there goes 10 bucks ...). Some of the apps, are very familiar to me, since they have been available on jailbroken devices for months, such as Vladimir Kofman's Converter ($1). It's a cool app, which doesn't seems to have changed a lot ... except that now it's much slower to start than before :-\ Hopefully Apple can fix that up in the up-coming 2.1 update .... 9_9

Bottom line, was it worth upgrading? Not really.

Blown away ...

2008-08-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

We had a long time friend over last night for diner and I had the "bad" idea to introduce him to the iPod touch. Now, he had heard about the iPhone and iTouch before, but never had the privilege to play with one ... and he was literally blown away by it, especially by the touch UI experience and easy of web browsing ... and also by the few games I had on it (still running jailbroken 1.1.14) making use of the on board accelerometers. I had to use all of my persuasion skills (which isn't much really) to restrain him from running to buy one right away ... with a rumored update right around the corner, it is definitly worth waiting a month or so.

This past Saturday, I was my self impressed by the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto on a friend PS3. I had heard of it before, obviously, but never actually played it .... let's hope an iPhone version (or clone) shows up on the app store ... 'cause it's a pretty darn cool game. Granted it's dark and violent, but it's a fun game nevertheless ... now if only I could manage to drive around without hitting pedestrians and other cars ... 9_9

Vacations reading hijacked!

2008-07-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

From the very moment I saw that the paperback edition of the latest Dune universe novel was out (while purchasing Aaron Hillegass' book), I knew that there was no way I would take advantage of my vacations to read more about Cocoa. What can I said, I'm a sucker for Dune novels ... Over the years, I have come to appreciate many of the books authored by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, even if some, like Sandworms of Dune, feel a little weak (to be honest, I also found some of the original Dune novels to be also not that great ...). Anyhow, I finished it yesterday so hopefully I can resume climbing the learning curve ... I just hope I didn't lose too much *:o)

Raiders of the Lost Creativity

2008-07-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling some lately with my attempt to convert myself as an indie developer on the Mac/iPhone platform. The problem that I face isn't technical (e.g learning Cocoa) but rather psychological ... Dude, where's my creativity? In my previous experiences (Newton, BeOS, QNX), I always had a very clear goals in mind when starting up, even if (in retrospect) they didn't turn out to been successful ... (but that's another story). This time around, I found my-self very excited by the platform ... but without any concrete idea of what the heck to do ... Meanwhile, the iTunes app store is filling up with some great pieces (and some crappies one apparently) of software (like Intua's BeatMaker), and I can't help feeling like I'm missing the boat or something ... :-\ Anyhow, I'm still committed albeit not overly motivated. I dropped tonight at my locale Chapters and grabbed the 3rd edition of Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. For once, they had it in stock. I actually also have (I should said had, since it's now in the recycling bin) the 1st edition, which have been collecting dust on my bookshelf for the past 5 years (it's so out of sync with the current version of Cocoa that it's not usable). Since I'm on holiday all next week, I'll try to set some time away from all the fun to read it and who knows maybe get some inspiration. In any case, if you've reading this and got some ideas ... let's get in touch 8-)

iPhone : D+3

2008-07-14T18:11:00.000-07:00

Well it's out, and in force, according to Apple which apparently got over 1 million activations over the week-end ... Wow, that's huge! However, the downloads from the Application store is actually even more impressive (10 Millions) and include not just the iPhone users but also the iPod touch users ... I was kind of hoping that the launch will be a flop in Canada, thanks to Rogers, but it seems like it wasn't the case since they said that they are sold-out. That been said, since it was said that Apple reduced the amount of iPhone they sent to Canada, they could be indeed sold-out very quickly :-D ... Anyway, I had to opportunity to check out a little bit the 3G Sunday at my local mall and yes, it looks very nice and tempting ...

iPhone : D-2

2008-07-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

Yep, only 48 hours away from the release of the iPhone 3G, and selfishly I don't really care since we won't be getting one, thanks to Rogers ultra-mega over-priced plan. Fact is that we don't really need a cell phone. We've been doing alright without one for the past 5-6 years, so there isn't much reason for us to get one ... except an iPhone at a decent price & plan, maybe? ...

What is more exciting, is the release of the iPhone/iTouch OS 2.0, and more specifically of the Application Store where one day (if I can get pass that reading documents stage I am in) I'll have some software released. Speaking of software and iPhone, the folks from touchArcade.com have put together an interesting article on the iPhone architecture, which is worth reading IMHO. If you are into gaming (even a little), it's a good idea to bookmark that site since they feature a lot of preview (with video) of games to come, as well as already available games for the jailbroken devices.

While I'm at it (giving links), I should mention that Wil Shipley have posted a new blog entry on his latest debugging adventures, and that if you are looking for Cocoa/Objective-C oriented blogs, you should look no further than Cocoa Blogs ... oh and keep reading this blog ;-)

Sunday procrastinating ...

2008-07-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

YouTube is great when you feel like procrastinating ... it has so much contents that you can spend hours looking for (and at) videos on a subject that interest you, without feeling too guilty about how you should have been reading that Cocoa document instead ... For example Sunday, I found a video made by NeXT in 1992, which shows the advantage of NeXTSTEP over Sun. The competition is centered on 2 programmers building a business application from the exact same specs, one using NeXT solutions the other the Sun equivalent. Does it look rigged? Well no ... but the requirements sounds a lot like they were selected to showcase the capabilities of NeXTSTEP ... which isn't that un-fair for Sun since it all made sense in the context of the application. Needless to said, NeXT came out as the clear winner with the shortest development time and the most features completed. In fact, the developer had so much extra time that he implemented things that were not asked for, while the Sun based implementation was not even completed ... :-)

Here's the two parts of the video, for you viewing pleasure:

It's interesting to think that 16 years after, developers still use the same tools to build applications for Macs ... Now, I'm still not fully convince (yet) that using Interface Builder is the way to go. I like my UI done programmatically you see ...

YouTube night ...

2008-07-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last night I stumbled on an interesting series of videos from the Computer History Museum, and watched the one featuring several of the key persons at Pixar including The Incredibles' director Bard Bird. Quite the interesting (and long by YouTube standards) talk. I don't think I caught the moderator's name but since he was talking about his book to be released "soon", at first I was thinking that it could be David Price (The Pixar touch) ... but then that book just got released, so since the video was recorded in 2005 that couldn't be. And it turns out that it was Michael Rubin, author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution ... Anyhow, that computer museum have a lot of good stuff on their web site, including (but not limited to) some old brochures downloadable in PDF format :-)

While on YouTube, I also found this funny video on Steve Jobs favorites expressions:

Pretty cool, uh? ;-)

Happy Cocoa Day! ... err Canada day ...

2008-07-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

Not since my early days as a Symbian developer, have I spent so many days just reading documents without doing much coding. Since today is an holiday in Canada, I'm sizing the opportunity to finish reading Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa, and then hopefully start reading the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. Early last week, I had finished reading the Objective-C 2.0 document from Apple, which (big surprise) is based on the original NeXT document I had read before, so yeah you can save yourself sometime by skipping that old document ... 9_9 Since I'm going over the memory management rules in use for Cocoa programming, I now realize (with some embarrassment) that my mistake with the exception from a couple of blog entries ago, was due to my ignorance of the common rule that a convenience constructor (such as +exceptionWith...) must autorelease the object that it creates.

Rogers have announced last week the pricing of the plans to go with the iPhone 3G in Canada. We were going to get an iPhone 3G (for my wife), but since, this is definitely way over-priced, we simply won't as she doesn't really need a cell phone. It's nice that the phone by it-self is much cheaper than a year ago, but the total cost of ownership is insane ... too bad for Rogers & Apple, since it looks like lots of people won't get it for the same reason.

We went to see Wall-E last night and really enjoyed it. I don't think it's the best ever Pixar movie in my book, but it is definitely a good one. The usual short movie, Presto, that is shown before the main attraction is most excellent :-) After the show, we were wondering what is the next movie to be released next year, and I though it will be Toy Story 3, but it turns out that it's one called Up ... and yes, there was no trailer for this up-coming movie before Wall-E :-(

Last but not least, Scott Stevenson has recently posted an article on Thinking like a Cocoa programmer, which is a good read for all Cocoa wannabee like myself :-)

Fresh from your mom's garden ...

2008-06-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

CBC Radio 2 has a very interesting radio show called The Signal which run every day of the week and feature contemporary (& experimental) music from around the world (yes, including Canada). Since the show runs from 10pm to 1am, I'm usually not able to listen to more than 10 or 15 minutes of it (I wishes they had a podcast, or some sort of on demand playback) but it is usually enough to discover a couple of intriguing music, such as the one played last night: The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra which use fresh vegetables from the market to make music. A delightful experience, check out this YouTube video:

Pretty neat eh? :-)

"Classical" Hip Hop

2008-06-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

If you happen to have read my first post on this blog, you already know that I won't be only talking programming here, but that will also blog about other subjects of interest, such as this one. CBC Radio 2 have made available on their Concerts on Demand site, a recording of the concert that Buck 65 have made with Symphony Nova Scotia. Yep, that's right ... an iconic figure of the Canadian Hip Hop scene, with a classical orchestra! Turntable and computer as part of the usual suspects of an orchestra!?? Simply Brillant! I hope this will come out eventually as a CD ... or better, as an iTunes download ;-)

To release or not to release? autorelease duh!

2008-06-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

Well, it turns out that the standard class methods used to instantiate a new NSException object, send an autorelease message to the object, effectively putting it on the nearest NSAutoreleasePool. As with my earlier issue with the cost of the try/catch block, I was mis-informed :-| ... mind you, I have yet to see any official document clearly stating the memory whereabouts of an exception ...

To release or not to release?

2008-06-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

Since exceptions in Objective-C are full featured objects (which don't have to be derived from NSException), it is legit for a code monkey to wonder when are the exceptions ... well you know, released. From what I have seen so far in Apple documents and from (most) code samples I see on the web, it appears as exception object are released automagically at some point ... but are they really? Having derived Cocoa's exception class to add an origin field to it, I also added to my class an implementation of the dealloc method (so that I could release the origin string). For good measure, I also added a printf statement just to verify that the method was been called (e.g I could have goofed up the signature).

As you will have guessed (easy since otherwise I will not be blogging about it), I found out that the method was not been called unless I explicitly send a release or autorelease message to the exception object within the catch block ... (!!?) A quick search on the web didn't yield more details, except for an blog post by Chris Hanson showing an autorelease message been sent from a finally block for a caught exception (however that occurrence is due to him retaining the exception in the catch block, so not really relevant to the case at hand). I'll have to dig this further ...

NSObject+CleanupAwareness

2008-06-24T18:05:00.000-07:00

To the risk of boring to death my single reader (sorry Usman!), let's continue a bit on the subject of exception :-P Thanks to Objective-C support for categories, it is possible to add shortcut methods to the ubiquitous NSObject class, so that any instantiation of a derived class (virtually any classes of Cocoa) can push and pop itself on/from an existing cleanup stack. And how do we get around of doing that you may ask? Well simply by creating a category of the class:

@interface NSObject (CleanupAwareness)

- (void) pushForCleanupL;

- (void) popFromCleanupL;

@end

The implementing it as follow:

@implementation NSObject (CleanupAwareness)

- (void) pushForCleanupL {

  [[HZCleanupStack current] pushL:self];

}

- (void) popFromCleanupL {

  [[HZCleanupStack current] popL:self];

}

@end

Then Objective-C will work its magic and any code linked to yours will have it's objects capable of being placed on our cleanup stack. Cool stuff isn't it? At first I wasn't too much excited by Objective-C (its syntax was a little odd for a C++ monkey like myself), but it have definitely grow on me as I got to known it better :-)

If you are, like myself, dying to see the next Pixar movie (this Friday!), be sure to read the review written by (darn) lucky Scott Stevenson on his blog. While you are had it, you may want to also read all the good material that he have written about Cocoa & Objective-C on Cocoa Dev Central.

Tidying things up a bit ...

2008-06-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

The second thing I have been carrying over from Symbian is a mechanism that goes hand-in-hand with exceptions, the (infamous among beginners) cleanup stack. Its purpose is quite simple: insure that no memory will be leaked when exception occurs. In an environment where exceptions are used pervasively (like Symbian), the interruption of the natural flow of execution can easily lead to temporary objects allocated on the heap been orphaned, each constituting a memory leak. The idea behind the cleanup stack (Symbian's style) , is to allow (and actually enforce) programmers to push object on a special stack prior to any call that could throw an exception, or to use the standard Symbian lingo: leave. Once the call has been completed, the object must be popped from the special stack. This sounds like extra work for the developer isn't it? Well, yeah it is a bit more work and a bit more careful thinking, but it is well worth the trouble when the application must run for long period of time on an system where resources are spare (iPhone anyone?).

Originally (well, last week actually ...) I had implemented my cleanup stack as a set of C functions to be called from within a try/catch block. The problem is that thanks to the lack of namespace and functions overloading in C, my functions had the severe tendency to be ultra long. Now, I know about Apple's mantra: "developer spend more times reading than writing code", but still who'll like to have to type this function call hundreds of times per file (yeah , OK I exaggerate a bit about the occurence of such call ...):

HZCleanupStackPopAndReleaseManyWithLastObjectL(...);

So yesterday I started re-implementing my stack as an Objective-C class which allow for more developer friendly code to be written, at the cost of a bit more overhead since messages are to be sent to the stack instead of more efficient function calls. Now, in case you did not follow one of the first page referenced on this post (actually the second one), allow me qto uickly show how the cleanup stack is been used. Let's assume that you need to call a function that is known to leave (following Symbian coding style, the function/method name must be post fixed with an upper case L): doSomeL(). As an experienced developer, you know that you must call this function from within a try/catch block or from another function that is also known to throw exception. In this case, we will use a try/catch block. Your function will be looking somewhat like this:

void doTest()
{
@try {

[HZCleanupStack windUpL];

doSomeL();

} @catch(NSException* lException) {

printf("exception occured\n");

} @finally {

[HZCleanupStack unwind];

}
}

It's contents is simple: at the start of the try block, the cleanup stack is winded-up (created) then the function is called. When the try/catch block end, the stack is un-winded (destroyed). If an object was created (and placed on the cleanup stack) in the doSomeL() function before it threw an exception, the un-winding of the stack in the finally block will release it, serving the purpose it was built for. Let's now have a look at an example of a toublesome function:

void doSomeL()
{
HZObject*       lObject[2];
HZReleaseStack* lStack = [HZCleanupStack current];

lObject[0] = [HZObject newLC];
lObject[1] = [HZObject newLC];
    
someFunctionL(false,lObject[1]);

[lStack popAndReleaseManyL:2 withLast:lObject[0]];
}

Here, we will assume that we have an class of object (HZObject) which will accept the selector newLC as a way of instantiating objects. The post fix LC indicates that the call can throw an exception and that otherwise it will leave the created instance on the cleanup stack. Since the function is known to potentially leave, it is assumed that it have been called from within a try/catch block, thus a cleanup stack is available, the selector current used on the class HZCleanupStack will return it to us (in fact, it will return the last winded stack for the calling thread) so that we can pop the two allocated objects. Now, what happens if this function isn't called from within a try/catch block? Well, the creation of the first object will throw an exception and the object it-self will be released.

If that help, I should maybe mention that the cleanup stack concept is somewhat a kin to a NSAutoreleasePool object with the added ability to push then pop objects at will. Maybe I'll add to this in a following post.

Be a software slut ...

2008-06-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Catchy title isn't it? Obviously it's an intriguing concept that I took from the hilarious talk (video) that superstar indie Mac developer Wil Shipley (of Omni Group & Delicious Monster fame) gave at the C4 conference in August last year. If you are an indie developer, or if you would like to be, or if you think that you may want to be (but don't know if you can do it), then you most definitely must watch Wil's take on hype (and other things that could potentialy make you successful). I guess, I should also mention his blog, although I'm sure that anyone reading this will have known about it for a while ... unless you are new to the scene (oh man this soooo early 90s! Quick get the Amiga out!). Anyhow, there's a lot of (very) good stuff to learn from that talk, so make sure you have some paper and a pen handy so that you can jolt it all down. How do I know it's sound advices? Well ... he's a successful independent developer, and I'm not. Therefore, what he have to said must be good advices ... unless he's just applying his (core) principles and hyping things ... hmmm 8-o

Zero-cost exception! (No, really).

2008-06-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

Following up on my post from this morning, it turned out that my hunch was correct. GCC on 64-bit MacOS X, require the -m64 flag to compile x64 code. Once I added it, the try/catch block really did become zero-cost. Problem solved (now what about on the iPhone?) ... as advertised by Apple release note :-)

Zero-cost exception?

2008-06-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

Like any code monkey that have been around for a while, I have assembled from my various experiences (BeOS, QNX, Symbian, Win32 ...) a particular coding style and set of paradigms/concepts I like to use for my own projects. When I start on a new platform, I usually have to adapt my style to what is available and/or most commonly used on the platform, and this is usually a good exercise that goes hand-in-hand with learning a new environment. Since I have picked-up the usage of exception for error handling from my mobile development days at Nokia, this is one of the first thing I have been looking at when starting with Objective-C. Now, I'm not going, in this blog, to join the on-going debate raging in the software community about the pros&cons of using exceptions vs. returning error codes, however I should state that I do prefers to use exceptions as they allow for a more elegant and clean (meaning readable) code (IMHO).

After finding a couple of references (can't find the link now) to the fact that Objective-C's exception handling is not as efficient as C++ (meaning not zero-cost), I decided that I should try to check that out. For that purpose I wrote a simple (and naive) test program which measure the elapsed time for a loop calling a function containing either a try/catch block or a old fashion if statement. Here is the function been called repeatedly:

void loop(Foo* aFoo)
{ 
static int i=0;
#ifdef _EXCEPTION
@try {
  [aFoo doSomeL:i++];
} @catch(NSException* lException) {
  printf("An exception was thrown!\n");
} @finally {
}
#else
if([aFoo doSome:i++] == NO)
  printf("An error occured!\n");      
#endif
}

The Foo object here used is of no real importance. In both path the message been sent will compare the value passed as argument and will return an error or throw an exception when an hard-coded value is reached within the loop. Since my immediate concern was the cost of try/catch block, I had set the hard-coded value to be higher than the loop range so that even if the test was been performed at each loop, it will not trigger an error or exception.

I was rather disappointed when I ran the program with if statement then with the try/catch block and noted than the later was 8.2 times slower (without any exception been throw). Since my understanding was that Objective-C's exception handling on 64-bit had been improved compared to 32-bit with 10.5 (see bottom of release notes), I'm definitely surprised considering that I was testing this on an iMac (Intel Core Duo 2, gcc 4.0). Now, it is possible that I'm doing something wrong ... I'll have to double check that I was indeed compiling for 64-bit, which I assumed was the case since I believe that gcc will use this mode per default on a 64-bit machine (at least that's the way it work on Linux).

Since I have easy access to a x64 Linux box (gcc 4.1 with Objective-C support), I quickly adapted my test to the absence of Cocoa and noted with than the cost of the try/catch block was only 1.03 times higher than an if statement ... evidently zero-cost as advertised. So what it's going on with OS-X?

Geeky arousal ...

2008-06-17T13:45:00.000-07:00

Circa 1990, I believe, my mom brought me to see a doctor for a reason that I have long forgotten. In fact it was a very forgetful event aside for one little thing ... Back then (if you recall), Doctors were very much into Personal Computers (in France at least), they were the early adopters of the digital age yet to come. In fact, they were so much into their computer that for the most part of the visit, they were only looking at their screen, typing away. While waiting in the waiting room, I noticed, casually lying on a coffee table, the (then) latest issue of Science & Vie - Micro (a french magazine dedicated to computers) with on the cover .... a NeXTcube in all its glory! And boy, was that hardware cool and sexy!

Needless to said I feverishly devoured the article, lusting away on the pictures and screenshots of NeXTSTEP in action, and I was amazed and aroused. At that time (I was only 16) my experience with computers have been limited to various BASIC powered "desktop" (Macintosh,Amstrad CPC,...) and pocket computers (Casio FX-702P). If I did program a bit back then (mostly on my pocket calculator), most of my time was really spend playing video games on my bulky IBM PC clone (8088 If I'm not mistaken) running DOS. It's easy to see how NeXT's hardware and OS was very much forward thinking ... It looked not only like something from a science fiction movie, but was also sporting features and a user interface that were very uncommon for the time (at least outside of the universities/multinationals circles). I will love to think that this encounter was the trigger of a closer involvement in computer science ... but I don't think it is really the case. I did start learning the more powerful Pascal language around that time ... but I can't recall if it was due to been aroused by NeXT.

18 years after, I'm finally making the move to NeXTSTEP ... or at least to its descendant, MacOS X. It's not that I could haven't done earlier since we have had an Apple computer for the past 5 years, but the conditions were never really right ...

Bandwith stealer (casual)

2008-06-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

Since I was in Victoria all week-end, I didn't manage to continue learning the way of the OS-X platform. However, since I had my iTouch with me, I was able to "steal" a bit of bandwidth from various location ... enough to check a couple of web sites (e.g Slashdot). I don't know if you have travelled to Victoria, but in order to get there you need to take a ferry (1.5 hours) on a very scenic trip. This is usually a good occasion to check out what kind of electronic toys are popular these days. During past trips, I had very often saw many Apple laptops (in majority at time!), but yesterday, oddly enough, I didn't see a single one, only PC laptops and a couple of iPhone and iPod touch and "older" iPods. I think that it will be nice if a wireless Internet access was provided on-board the ferry, however one should really be enjoying the trip from the promenade decks and not be plowing away on a laptop (albeit it should be possible to geek from the deck).

In the past, when confronting with the need to learn a new platform, I have in most case been subject to hard time constraints (e.g day job) forcing me to get up to speed as quickly as possible. However, since my current Cocoa endeavor isn't bound to any particular project (at the moment) I have been taking my time, leisurely (some may said lazily) reading the various documents I have printed-out (sorry, I'm not much for ready PDF on a screen). The thing with Apple documentation, is that it is usually filled with good content, while being also pleasant to the eyes. True be told, I haven't really started reading a document authored by Apple, since I have been reading and older document published by NeXT: Object-Oriented Programming and the Objective-C language. But, I can said that the layout and content are definitly very much akin to Apple's documents (e.g The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language). Since I'm not even half-way trough the document, and that so far it have only covered the basic OO concepts, which which I'm already familiar, I can't (yet) tell if it is a recommended reading when getting started with MacOS programming. Likely it's an interesting read from an historical standpoint, but likely not a mandatory one since it's a little bit outdated (I believe it is from 1997).

JavaOne vs. WWDC #2

2008-06-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

To follow-up on my last post, I wanted to add that WWDC is (obviously) more akin to Google I/O. There again, most (if not all) of the conference contents is available on the web (e.g Android talks). Now, the thing with WWDC, is that all but the keynote is under an NDA. One may wonder why all the sessions/talks at a developers conference need to be protected by such agreement? Does Cocoa 101 really need to be under NDA?

Anyhow ... I'm heading for the passport office this morning (to apply in person). Since I have heard a lot of horror stories about how long the line-up can be ... I'm making sure that I have enough loaded up on my iTouch to last several hours.

JavaOne vs. WWDC

2008-06-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

If I had some readers, I'll probably get a lot of flak about the title of this post. Afterall, JavaOne and WWDC, it's like comparing ... well apple to orange. While the Java event is more about Java technologies and the community, Apple's yearly event is very much focused on offering to developers the opportunity to learn/improve/discover the Apple platform(s). So then, what is there to compare you may ask? Well, coverage and openess of the event. While the WWDC keynote is overly covered both by the press and the attendees (and by Apple), the rest of the week goes by relatively un-noticed and uncovered. Sure, there is a couple of blogs/sites on which (lucky) participants share (a bit of) their adventure (e.g The iLife) but official coverage from Apple is non-existant (please correct me if I'm wrong). A starck difference with what Sun provides online during (and after) JavaOne. Now, I'm aware that attending WWDC isn't free, thus I can understand that sessions material isn't readily available on the web during/after the conference, but I do think that a bit more coverage geared towards the developer that couldn't (but wanted to) make it, could be beneficial to the community IMHO.

Vous prendrez bien un bol de cacao chaud?

2008-06-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

As you will have guessed (from the title) this is another one of these geeky blogs where the author will be rambling posts after posts on various things including (but not limited to): Mac, OS, iPhone/iPod, Cocoa+Objective-C, programming, gadgets, movies, music ... Well, I think you got the point: heavily geeky stuff.

About two weeks ago, I got myself an iPod touch. The purchasing process by it-self was rather quick (and painless, except for the bank account), however the whole decision process leading to the choice of the latest gadget I should carry around, took weeks... At first, I had set my eyes on a PSP. It sounded like the good blend of gaming, mp3ing, surfing and possibly coding, but then I found out that in order to hack on the device, the battery had to be physically modified (unless that is you get a developer seat from Sony, I presume) ... and that, for a software guy like myself was the definitive deal breaker. Also, during the week leading to my purchase, I managed to borrow my brother-in-law's PSP. The surfing experience on it failed to really excite me (also the text entering method "a la" cellphone is a major pain IMHO), altogether I must said that device is neat ... but definitely not as sweet as the iPod, especially since some good (casual, not hardcore) games are coming out for it :-)

Anyhow ... I'll ramble some more in coming posts on my experience with the iPod touch (thereafter referred as iTouch), but I can said that the whole thing got me to finally join the legion of the Apple code monkeys. Since I have always been (and always be, regardless of the amount of Windows' code I have been coerced into authoring over the years) a Unix guy at heart, switching wasn't much of a big leap ...